L returns to the biblical locus, in terms more nearly resembling Bede and Wimbledon than Will and Abelard, on several occasions; see, for example, 8.234L, 9.273, 19.250L. And the poem includes a rich variety of more distant allusions to the passage, through its reliance both on biblical uses of the verb reddere (including both line 32L below and the climactic 21.258–59) and on English terms derived from the parable situation, e.g., reeue and arrerage at 11.296–98, and more distantly 12.60–71, 13.35, 21.459–64.
But the discourse of gospel parable here flows together with Statute language. Just as Reason in the legal realm, Wimbledon is utterly clear in his belief that the reckoning of Luke 16 requires labor: “he þat is neiþer traueylynge in þis world whanne þe day of his rekenyng comeþ, þat is þe ende of þis lif, ryʓt as he lyuede here wiþoutyn trauayle, so he shal þere lacke þe reward of þe peny, þat is þe endeles ioye of heuene” (alluding to Matt. 20:9, etc.; cf. 7n).
But Will at this moment has caught on to what is at issue in the interrogation and preempts the legal arguments he expects Reason to produce (see 29–30n for the passage in 12 Rich. II at issue). to wayke to wurcche specifies “non valeo” (Luke 16:3) but moves from the gospel to directly answer the language of the Statute: “Beggars impotent to serve (les mendinantz impotentz de servir, viz. to labor in the fields) shall abide in the Cities and Towns where they are dwelling at the Time of the Proclamation of this Statute” (12 Rich. II, c. 7; SR 2:58). Will, of course, quibbles on the degree of “impotence” at issue (see 21n and Reason’s suggestion in lines 33–34 that he demonstrate he has a debilitating injury), but his point is clear enough: as a weak beggar, he has every legal right to be and to remain where he is—in Cornhill. In a similar vein, see 89–91n below.
24 to long: The other explicit reference to the dreamer’s height occurs at 10.68, although it is always implicit in his name (e.g., in the signature at B 15.152). Here he refers to his stature with more than a touch of pride in opposing it to lowness. But (as Skeat first saw) this language, however descriptive physically, includes its own provocations, for it echoes “Grete lobies and longe þat loth were to swynke” (Prol.53) and intensifies Will’s associations with the lollares/lewede Ermytes whom he resembles (see 2n above) while wishing to be differentiated from them (see, e.g., 45–47n below). As Schmidt points out, the line provides only half a signature, thus exposing the dreamer to Reason’s next inquiry, “Thenne hastou londes to lyue by?” (26, my emphasis). On the proverbial suspicion of tall men, see Deskis-Hill 2004.
26–34 Reson seeks clarification from the dreamer: The speech bounces between two poles of Statute discourse. On the one hand, Reason goes out of his way to be helpful and inviting; he feeds Will, as it were, legal lines by which he might justify his failure to labor (e.g., 26–27n and 33–34, lines that echo materials discussed in 21n, 22–25n). But equally, Reason judges the dreamer by his external appearance: either he is idle pure and simple (see 28n) or he can be conflated—as Will’s insistence upon his height has done—with those hermits for whom he has claimed to have deepest (and mutual) antipathy.
26–27 hastow … thy fode: The Statutes of Laborers, directed toward field hands (cf. 8.329), were never meant to apply to those with sufficient land or resources to support themselves. Thus, among the marks that single out the agrarian laborer who is its object, 23 Edw. III, c. 1 (SR 1:307) includes a person “[not] having of his own whereof he may live, nor proper Land (propriam culturam, perhaps ‘his own arable’), about whose Tillage he may himself occupy.”
In very practical terms, Reason asks the dreamer-poet whether he has a patron. The conversation, most especially Will’s response as it develops after line 59, should be compared with 13.104–16, a discussion of ecclesiastical title. (13.111 “no lond ne lynage ryche ne good los of his handes” echoes this passage verbally and refers to the need, in the absence of support, to perform manual labor.) There the speaker Recklessness argues that no priest should be ordained without a patron to insure he has a living; he claims that provision of such support is analogous to a king’s provision of a fee for one of his knights (cf. line 77 below). See further 52n (on chantry priests and their stipends) and 54n (on Will’s possible self-presentation as an aristocratic, not agricultural “servant”).
28 A spendour … or a spilletyme: Note line 64 below, with the dreamer’s passing ad hominem appeal to his interlocutor, his later admission and justification in lines 93–101, and Reason’s further return to the theme in his sermon, lines 126–27 below. This complex of ideas—“spending speech and tyning time”—recur as Imaginative’s C Version definition of Dowel (14.4–10), that true action enjoined by Holychurch and, perhaps significantly, entirely sufficient for laypersons but not for clerics. Further, to facilitate the discussion here, L excised in the course of C revision another self-referential discussion, B 9.99–106 (cf. Aers 1975:66). In the spirit of that passage, Will here has trouble claiming he is “Goddes gleman,” not just “a goere to tavernes” involved in jangling, lakkyng, or some other impermissible minstrelsy.
Time-wasting, the alehouse, and general engagement in “worldly vanity” are emphatically associated with both producing and consuming “romance” poetry in the prologues to five large earlier texts, some of which L surely knew (The South English Legendary, Robert Manning’s HS, CM, the London translation of Robert of Gretham’s Evangiles, and SV). A large part of the discussion of the Last Judgment at PC 5644–724 expands extensively upon time wasted, for example, the implications of Matt. 12:36, “For each idle word an account shall be rendered on the day of judgment.” The topic recurs persistently in SV (Hanna 2013:131 n.19), as well as in the Rollean Holy Boke Gracia Dei, at 16/4–17/8, 22/18–44/4 (including “jangling,” 32/10–35/12), 57/9–60/4, and 68/5–69/4 (the last two passages discussing hindrances to prayer, cf. B 12.16–17, 25–28). See further Martin 1979:62–65, Schmidt 1987:11 n21 and 16 (who insists on David as model for the psalter-clerk Will), and Burrow 2003.
L loosely conjoins a variety of issues under the theme of wasteful expenditure. On the one hand, the world’s work, from which the dreamer absents himself, relies on a conception of time as an economic commodity. For the late medieval development of such a secularized time to facilitate policed labor, see Le Goff’s provocative essays, 1980:29–52 (50–51 on the sin of idleness). Cf. 3.462–63.
Yet this injunction to use time in labor is neither simple nor absolute. As Piers discovers at 8.213–15, leel labour does not simply fill out duration to produce some quantum but requires a proper spirit as well (cf. such a reprise as 12.95–96). Moreover, proper temporal expenditure is subject to further qualifications, to that mesure that Holychurch makes so central to her teaching; L constantly returns to sabbatarian arguments on the need to set aside work time to meet the obligations imposed by sacramental time (see 30n; 6.182–85n, 429–32n; A 7.112; 7.226n; 8.80n; 9.220–41n).
Such attitudes do not simply remain for L injunctions to religious practice (as, for example, in Sloth’s confession), however. The obligations of ecclesiastical time feed back into labor issues and provide an etiology of the bad or unwilling workman (see lines 65–69 below, 9.167–75 and nn, for example). In such theorizing, the refusal to restrain sexual urges (and to heed either the sacramental imperatives of marriage or ecclesiastical prohibitions of intercourse at certain times) becomes an indicator of a more general lack of self-discipline, particularly of a disinclination to foster offspring properly; as a result, children of such unions are inevitably, as if genetically, damned. Holychurch first broaches this theme at 1.24–29 (note esp. the final line) and initially tars Meed with this brush at 2.24–29L.